“Ah used to feed she with me lip,” daSilva said.
“O shut up,” Cameron cried. “Who cares?”
“Why did you pelt it?” daSilva cried.
“Wait you going on like if is you I pelt. Aw shut up, I hungry.”
“I ask you why you pelt the ring of me flesh….”
“O Christ, shut up,” said Cameron. “I didn’t pelt you. I didn’t see no precious ring. You is bewitched … that’s what….”
DaSilva muttered wildly — “I tell you when you pelt she you pelt me. Is one flesh, me flesh, you flesh, one flesh. She come to save me, to save all of we. You murderer! what else is you but a plain vile murderer? She ain’t no witch….” His face was mad.
“Who say she is a witch …” Cameron began to protest.
DaSilva jumped. Cameron’s hands flashed. For the first time in his life he missed. The truth was he had no footing in the water: he groaned and fell, his face grinning and splashing surprise. The crew were dumb. They bore him up unwittingly. He was dead and his blood ran and encircled their hand.
DaSilva shook like a leaf. The knife and blade fell from his fingers as flesh from bone turning dean and silver in the stream.
“O God,” said Donne in voiceless surprise and horror as at himself. “What have you done daSilva to a brother friend?”
DaSilva did not hear and understand. He too was deaf and dumb. He saw Cameron in the stream and in the sky where their joint flesh had flown and darted above the fantasy of their carnal death. He looked around foolishly, telling himself Cameron had attacked him in some idle and faithless fashion. It all seemed blind and empty now like the air and stream that jostled them.
The Arawak woman pointed and Vigilance, straining his mind from the volcanic precipice where he clung, looked and saw the blue ring of pentecostal fire in God’s eye as it wheeled around him above the dreaming memory and prison of life until it melted where neither wound nor witch stood.
IX
The Arawak woman rolled like a ball on the cliff, clinging to tree and stone and Vigilance was able to follow. The river crept far beneath them, and above them — beyond the wall they were climbing — lay safety and freedom. Vigilance knew that every step he made was a miracle of survival. It was incredible he had escaped after the wreck of the boat and succeeded in climbing so far and high. Millions of years had passed he knew until now he felt bruised and wounded beyond words and his limbs had crawled and still flew. He had slept in a cradle of branches and in a cave overlooking the chasm of time. However strange it was the fact remained he was living after all. The memory of the conventional crew was a dead eccentric belief that still continued to haunt him every now and then whenever he thought he had fallen and died in the primitive moments of a universal emptiness and fear.
The fantasy of the fourth day dawned — the fourth day of creation — since they had all set out from Mariella. From his godlike perch he discerned the image of the musing boat in which they had come. They had found a cave the previous nightfall and they had stretched their limbs until morning.
It was a close fit lying there — too close for ease and normal sleep — and everyone stirred when Vigilance moved. They could not help turning their dull eye upon the vessel they had managed to anchor at their ghostly side in the stream and it was as if they sought a long lost friend and soul. Everyone stirred and woke, all except Cameron. He was dead with a stab wound in his back. In their enormous fatigue the night and day before they had kept him at their side as they would an idol and companion.
They hurriedly abandoned him in the cliff, turning the room in which they had slept into his grave alone, and were soon travelling fast in the river when Jennings deliberately shut off the engine and the boat swung in the stream, lodging its bow in a fresh hollow of stone.
“Ah got an idea,” he announced. He spoke with hopeless obstinacy. His face was no longer the same as before: it had changed into a dream, the dream of an unnatural unshaven dead man’s beard and growth. The cheeks were hollow as the caves in the wall and the blackness of his skin had grown lighter and greyer into an older drier mask and presence lying within. The lust and soul of rebellion had been killed abruptly in a manner that left him suddenly empty. He felt now only the loss of an opposition and true adversary within himself. His eyes had lost all rude fire and in their blindness and loneliness they spun deeper than nature’s darkness and light. It was the strangest abstract face Vigilance had ever seen — the abstraction of a shell afloat over a propeller and a machine with the consistency of a duty rather than of a desire and a spirit. Indeed it reminded him of a coconut shell he had once observed beached against the river; someone had brought it a long way from its natural grave on the seacoast and deposited it here dry and desiccated and foreign in the midst of the river’s stone and vegetation. He had held the husk in his hand and it had given a dry brittle harp’s cry of relief, mummified and mystical and Egyptian, melting at the same time into an inner dust that crumbled to an ancient door of life.
It was the oldest soulless expression of self-surrender he had ever seen — the dutiful mask of resurrection and the engineer of death.
“Ah got an idea,” said Jennings again. His voice was meaningless. “Let we look for the hole where the wild tapir pass through the cliff. Was when? Yesterday? Or day before yesterday? Let we pass through the same door to the land … This is dead man river … We can’t stay here any more….”
DaSilva shook his head. “Ah dream you done dead already Jennings,” he tried to crack a joke. “And the hole close up for good for you a million year ago. You is a prehistoric animal.” His chest brayed foolishly. “Where Cameron?” he asked.
No one replied.
“Where Cameron?” he asked again. A sickly smile that reflected everyone’s condemnation wrinkled his lips. “Ah dream Cameron dead too,” he confessed, “and yet he swim and float next to me trying to hug and kiss me. Is he pull me down. Is a sight to feel a drowning man clinging to you,” he pleaded and confessed. “I had to stab at he to mek he loose me. And still he hold on. Don’t mind how ugly you find it …” he shuddered and hiccoughed in a sentimental bloated fashion of goodwill … “is still the dream of love floating everywhere … I forgive he … even if he mek me dream bad that a bewitched whore killed us both … grabbed hold us in the water … pulled us down …” He spoke with the blind innocence of a clown floundering in the blank of memory in the shattering of his life.
Jennings turned his abstract face towards him indifferently as if he knew another version. “Yes is common knowledge you kill poor Cameron daSilva. Is common knowledge in the world you encourage he to mek this trip and that you quarrel stupid-stupid with he in the end. Nobody know the reason ’cept was jealousy or love. Is he probe at me till he enrage me to lef’ the shit I been living in. I was always a stay-at-home not like wutless Cammy.” A grotesque tear opened his cheek.
DaSilva chuckled gaining a flash of an old rumour of fellowship in winning this ugly tear and response — “He butt me like if he was mad. I dive and pull away from he … But I didn’t mean to hurt he. Not Cammy. How could I ever hurt Cammy? Was me last memory and hope of happiness in this world. I remember feeling surprised that I had seconds of drowning life and fight lef’ in me while poor Cammy was bewildered and dead and didn’t feel a thing….”